Ordinary Magic

The trick is there is no trick. There is only paying attention.

This year for my birthday, I asked for magic. What I meant was the type of magic that happens when a group of people decide to put more effort than is necessary into something pointless and silly—in this case, strapping a guitar and two ukuleles and a 5-gallon bucket drum to kayaks stuffed with decadent snacks and drinks, and paddling out to an abandoned 1860s military fort in Casco Bay. There were sparkle shirts and neon adventure pants and a banana costume. Someone brought bubbles. We filled Fort Gorges with music, sang to an osprey, watched sailboats turn gold as the sun dropped low, and jumped at just the right time to see it set twice.

What I didn’t expect—what I never expect even though I’ve done this enough times by now to know that I should—was how much magic would meet me back. Calm seas. A friend who lent us seven kayaks to pull this off. The faces of people I love (and some I’m just getting to know), radiant with surprised joy and orange light. We paddled home with headlamps on, beneath a dusky sky that pulled shadows through the water, making every ripple a whole moment. I fell asleep brimming, my kitchen a mess of leftovers and wine and a crumpled banana, grateful, thinking it was done.

But that’s not how magic works.

Last night it struck again when I drove up at the end of a long day to work a campfire circle at Seguinland Institute, the gap semester program where I teach creative writing and outdoor adventure, and my students came with an Irish fiddle, an electric bass, shy voices, and the vulnerability it takes to offer a song. Again when the Seguinland director materialized out of the woods with a plate of pancakes because I’d said once in passing that sometimes I liked eating breakfast for dinner. Again during a walk with a can of cider and a friend under the almost-full moon. Again. Again. Again.

My body woke me up this morning at 4:30am: the time of my birth 38 years ago. I walked barefoot out to the water, where I stood under Orion and listened to the flapping of fish in the outgoing tide. I came back to bed and wrote into dawn.

“There are two paths to magic: imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods. Paying attention is about intentional noticing,” writes poet and naturalist Jarod K. Anderson. “Magic requires our attention, our choice to participate. We must choose to meet it halfway. And when we do, we often find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning. A nod to the unquantifiable.”

Funny, isn’t it, how the unquantifiable is perhaps the best way to measure a life. Please god let me never forget this.

I started keeping a list of Things That Are Magic two years ago, and I’ve been adding to it ever since. Here it is so far: Moonlight on water. The saucy shimmer of an August evening. Summer tomatoes. Rain. Flickering candlelight. The silent seconds after a song ends. The Internet (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but one never knows why, or how). Goat cheese. Fireflies. Fragrance of lilac. A lover’s fingers pressed gently into the nape of my neck. A slow kiss. 

Lawn sprinklers. Hummingbirds. Wooden things made by hand. Tall jeans. The point in a good book when a hook appears behind my bellybutton and yanks me all the way through the end. The point on a run when I forget that I’m running. Whale song. Dancing. The time I forgot my cleats at the most important frisbee tournament of the year and found a pair in the lost in found, exactly my size.

Being in the right place and knowing it. The unspooling of a body in a sauna. A baby’s tiny fingers. The smell of snow. An airplane landing strip at night. Prisms. Treehouses. The way a dog knows when it’s time to go outside and lay down to meet her death. 

Yellow leaves spinning against blue sky. The perfect bite: salt, fat, crunch, squish, honey; the way my body trembles to taste it. Pocket rocks. Cold plunges. Love notes left for strangers in cracked brick walls. The sound of pen on paper. Bioluminescence.

When you’re driving away giddy from the hospital and you want to squeal your tires but you don’t just in case they hear and change their minds. Dad, at 82, singing in a truck with the windows down. The moments before dawn when everyone in the house is breathing in the dark. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Old growth trees. The way they make me cry. This place. Did you know that owl feathers are studded with fringe that muffles the sound of their flight? That an Eastern hemlock can live for over 500 years? That river otters hold hands while they sleep? That some mosses glow in the dark? A white pine cluster has five needles, which is the same number as the letters w-h-i-t-e. A red pine has three: r-e-d.

There are so many corners in my heart for this. 

Every year on my birthday, I write myself a letter, which I hide in a drawer until it’s my birthday again. The older I get, the less advice I end up giving myself. Maybe I’ve gotten better at trusting the magic that makes up a life. Maybe I’ve gotten better at telling myself the truth. This year’s letter ends like this:

Don’t think too hard about it, love. Just go on. Be it.